Ringforts or Fairy Homes: Oral Understandings and the Practice of Archaeology in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Ireland

Ringforts, the most numerous archaeological monument in the Irish landscape, have a dual character as places of early medieval habitation and as supernatural points of access to a fairy Otherworld. In my paper, I examine how these understandings interacted with, challenged and reinforced each other in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and how oral perceptions had a significant if generally unacknowledged role in determining supposedly scientific archaeological perceptions of these monuments.     

Remembering and Forgetting: The Relationship Between Memory and the Abandonment of Graves in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Greek Cemeteries

This paper examines the concept of commemoration as an expression of social memory and its relationship to time and space as manifested through the mortuary evidence from Modern Greek cemeteries. Of particular interest is the act of commemoration itself: who remembers whom and the length of time that this type of memory endures. Based on evidence collected from a number of different cemeteries in northern Kythera and the eastern Corinthia, I argue that memory at the nuclear family level determines the length of time a grave is remembered as a physical location. Once this memory ceases to exist, the grave gradually enters a process of neglect, which ultimately leads to its abandonment. Some abandoned graves are recycled for use by other families who, in the absence of any recollection or memory of the grave, remove and destroy the old monuments (if they exist) and the remains of the previous occupants. Particular burial spaces are, thus, reclaimed by new groups.     

Constructing places for the market: The case of Newcastle,NSW

Abstract

Cities with a heritage of heavy industry, such as Newcastle (NSW), face an insecure future as they undergo economic restructuring. The identities of cities are being refashioned by entrepreneurial urban governments, as part of a three‐pronged attempt to market their territories. A social construction approach reveals the problematic nature of these symbolic reconstructions, their partiality, the reduction of heritage to a commodity, and the eliding of socio‐economic disadvantage. The new post‐industrial identity for Newcastle disinherits working people, ignores the local indigenous peoples, and trivialises the role of women. The richly layered urban landscape and historically constructed narratives – the local heritage – have been cynically appropriated and transformed for the purposes of place marketing. The rhetoric of post‐industrialism conceals poverty and alienation, and the associated physical restructurings are displacing service‐dependent populations.     

The Survival, Revival and Decline of British Economic Influence in Malaysia, 1957-70

Independence for Malaya in 1957 (and the enlargement of thefederation to form Malaysia in 1963) did not have an immediatelyadverse effect upon British economic interests there. Indeed,Britain retained, and even revived, its huge commercial, industrial,and financial presence in Commonwealth Southeast Asia well intothe 1960s. From the middle of that decade, however, Britisheconomic influence in Malaysia declined quite rapidly. The mainfocus of this article is to examine three possible causes ofthis downturn: declining competitiveness on the part of Britishmanufactures; UK government policy towards private investmentand public expenditure overseas; and entrepreneurial weaknessesamong the British agency houses in Malaysia.     

Property and Propriety: Jewish Landlords in Early Twentieth-Century Toronto

Drawing on literatures on the social construction of place and identity, and on the changing nature of urban property ownership, this paper examines Jewish immigrants to Toronto as housing landlords, situating their activities in the context of wider changes in the city's housing market and of their needs to raise capital, achieve status and foster group identity. Using archival and newspaper evidence to reconstruct the behaviour of individual landlords, it is argued that ownership of inner-city property fulfilled numerous functions, especially related to other aspects of business proprietorship, but that it also accentuated the geographical concentration of poorer Jews, with critical implications for their relations with non-Jews.     

The Consuming Visions of Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-century Anarchists: Actualising Political Violence Transnationally

Pre-First World War anarchists blamed industrial society for denying its working class the share of the good life that was its due. Their critiques of their contemporary ‘regime of consumption’ were more than marginal to their views of a society they saw as upholding distributive injustice with the means of state violence. They conceived of a bourgeois system that had to be consumed and attacked with its own weapons: political violence. Hence the tactics of ‘propaganda by deed’ and ‘direct action’, the power of dynamite and later on syndicalist organisation appeared as appropriate means to overcome state-centred capitalist society and to usher in alternative ‘regimes of consumption’ based on cooperative or communist models allowing the producers to enjoy the fruits of their labour. Two of the most prominent German adherents of such visions, Johann Most and Wilhelm Hasselmann, were prompted to adopt the transnational propaganda of anarchist terrorism by their experience of state repression, exile and a series of terrorist events they associated themselves with. Siegfried Nacht, whose attitudes were heavily influenced by French syndicalism, sought to transfer older traditions of violent class struggle to the realm of economic terrorism. All their attempts at actualising political violence transnationally were marked by a desire to overcome weakness and the gap that separated visions of revolutionary acts and future societies from the starkly contrasting reality of their increasingly isolated and marginal political positions. The intellectual nexus between ‘political economy from below’ and contemporary practices of violence is crucial for understanding anarchist terrorism. Enemy images of parasitic consumers based on dichotomies between justified producer-consumers and criminal exploiter-consumers were part and parcel of its ideological currency.

In countries with revolutionary trade union tactics the boycott is given emphasis and rendered more effective by the boycotting crowd threatening and damaging the goods, stockrooms and factories owned by those being boycotted, by smashing windows, by throwing stink bombs into department stores, which will chase away the clientele, sometimes even by smashing up and setting fire to the stockrooms. (Siegfried Nacht, Die direkte Aktion, 19071 ?[1] Roller Roller, Arnold [Siegfried Nacht]. [1907]. Die direkte Aktion, revolutionäre Gewerkschaftstaktik, New York: Freiheit Publishing Association. without year [Google Scholar] [Siegfried Nacht], Die direkte Aktion, 39–40. My translation. This work is sometimes attributed to 1903, but in various library catalogues I have found no evidence supporting this claim. The two copies I consulted both listed publications from 1906 in the bibliography. View all notes)     

Keeping the Devil at Bay: The Shoe on the Coffin Lid and Other Grave Charms in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-century America

Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century graves excavated archaeologically in the United States are occasionally found in association with objects beyond the typical clothing or coffin hardware, such as ceramic vessels, coins, and perhaps most mysterious of all, a single shoe placed on the lid of the coffin or casket. Not clearly described in archival accounts, the single shoe phenomenon within a mortuary context is argued here to be a creolized practice, combining an African cosmology and belief in the liminal state of the soul after death with a European and especially British Isles tradition of shoes as magical objects and potential traps for evil.     

A Great Electioneer and His Motives Reconsidered: The 4th Duke of Newcastle

The 4th duke of Newcastle (1785–1851) is recognized as one of the most prominent peers with electoral influence in early-19th-century Britain. This essay considers the way in which he deployed that influence and the purposes to which it was turned. The essay explains why Newcastle became a leading symbol of the campaign for parliamentary reform and details the nature of his opposition to the bill which eventually became the ‘Great’ Reform Act of 1832. In some respects, Newcastle was an atypical electioneer, because he was less overtly concerned with the desire for office, patronage, or income. On the other hand, the methods by which that influence was deployed, and the anti-reform purposes to which it was turned, meant that he was inevitably numbered among the reactionary forces opposing political change in this period.     

The Confessions of Dolgoruki: Fiction and Masternarrative in Twentieth-Century Iran

This paper is an in-depth study of The Confessions of Dolgoruki, the purported memoirs of a nineteenth-century Russian ambassador to Iran, long adduced as a document proving the claim that the Bahā'īs of Iran are spies of foreign powers. It unearths several early versions of the text, contextualizes the creation of The Confessions, exams the zeitgeist that produced it, and tracks the changes the text went through as the dominant socio-political discourse changed over time. In discussing the range of reactions The Confessions provoked, this paper traces the intriguing path through which this text created the masternarrative of Bahā'ī espionage. Finally, a hypothesis regarding the identity of the original creator of the text is advanced.     

The Holy Thorn Ceremony: Revival,Rivalry and Civil Religion in Glastonbury

This study examines the chapbook tales of Tom Thumb and Jack the Giant-Killer. The earliest recorded forms of these stories are discussed and it is contended that the common dismissal of their Arthurian elements as unimportant background—Arthur's Britain as a variant of “Once upon a time”—is unhelpful. Rather, both arguably embody and illustrate important points about the nature of the Arthurian legend in an era in which interest in this had declined considerably. It is suggested that the Arthurian element in Tom Thumb is, while not central, significant, and that it is best viewed in the context of an established pattern of development and expansion of the international Arthurian cycle that meets the needs and interests of different audiences. Jack the Giant-Killer, in contrast, seems to owe a noteworthy debt to the Arthur of Welsh and/or Cornish folklore rather than to the roi fainéant of the international legend, perhaps reflecting the decline in importance of the latter since the time of the The History of Tom Thumbe (1641).     

Early Twentieth-Century Catalan Regionalist Theory: Lluís Duran I Ventosa,His Times,and the Influence of the Austrian Empire

Abstract. The constitutional question of how to treat ethnic minorities within the context of a greater state has presented problems since the age of nationalism up to the present day. Several Catalan political theorists from the beginning of the twentieth century produced a large quantity of generally overlooked and untranslated work on the subject, which defined a terminology and discussed solutions in a manner coherent enough to be applicable to most times and places, and to withstand the test of scrutiny alongside better-known theorists. The thoughts of Lluis Duran i Ventosa, the theorist behind the Catalan regionalist movement in the first quarter of this century, deserve special exposure. He and his contemporaries demonstrated great understanding not only of their context within Spain, but also of generally applicable concepts, as well as an understanding of other societies, notably the Austrian Empire.